Digital satellite broadcasting is being widely used increasingly. As compared with existing analog broadcasting, digital satellite broadcasting is resistant to noise and fading and is able to transmit a high-quality signal. Digital satellite broadcasting can also increase frequency utilization factor and can provide multiple channels. For example, in the digital satellite broadcasting, one satellite can secure several hundreds of channels. The digital satellite broadcasting prepares a large number of special channels such as a sports program, a movie, music and a news program, and these special channels are broadcasting the programs of their own contents.
Of these special channels, a music program channel is one of the popular channels of the digital satellite broadcasting and is broadcasting promotion programs mainly introducing new songs and hit songs.
The conventional music channel is broadcasting the music promotion programs introducing new songs and hit songs in the form of moving pictures and sounds. Listeners are often urged to purchase a CD with introduced numbers and wish to listen to such numbers while viewing the music promotion programs. Listeners often want to know information about artists in the desired numbers and information about an album of desired numbers. While listeners are viewing music channel programs and wish to get the information about the artist of desired number and the information about the album of such desired numbers, it would have been very convenient for the listeners if they could get such information on the spot. When the listeners found favorite numbers, it would have been very convenient if they could download audio data of such desired numbers. The conventional music channel is, however, unable to meet such listeners requests because it is usually transmitting moving pictures and sounds concerning numbers to the listeners one-sidedly.
To solve the above problem, there is proposed a music contents distribution system capable of easily obtaining information concerning music broadcast on the music channel and which is also able to easily download number data to a data storage equipment (Japanese patent application No. 9-308488 (1997)). Some proposed music contents distribution system is able to download words data and jacket data as well as the music data.
When a user sets up the music contents distribution system, the user who receives digital satellite broadcasting should connect a tuner for receiving digital satellite broadcasting to a data storage equipment (recording equipment) using a recording medium such as a magnetooptical disk to download a music program received at the tuner onto the recording equipment. When the music program received at the tuner is downloaded onto the recording equipment, the recording operation of the recording equipment connected to the tuner should be controlled based on data such as a start time of the corresponding program transmitted together with the music program, for example, by the digital satellite broadcasting, and hence the tuner and the recording equipment should be set in such a manner that they can operate in unison with each other. There are known various types of the recording equipment for recording an audio signal, for example, and hence an unspecified recording equipment, which will be connected to the tuner, cannot directly be controlled substantially based on data from a broadcast station from which music program is transmitted.
Only one recording equipment is not always connected to the tuner, and a plurality of recording equipment may be connected to the tuner. In that case, the broadcast station is unable to select a specific recording equipment to which a music program should be downloaded, and hence the tuner has to explore some countermeasures to select a specific recording equipment.
In order to make the above download become possible, the assignee of the present application has previously proposed a control equipment in which a program (HTML (Hyper Text Make-Up Language), MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia Information Coding Experts Group), XML (extensive Markup Language) called scripts) from the outside obtains device information from an internal program previously-prepared in the tuner and is able to instruct the tuner to select a specific device onto which the broadcast music program should be downloaded based on the device information (Japanese patent application No. 10-202360 (1998)).
The processing proposed by the previously-proposed application encounters with the problem that, when the user energizes the tuner to start the download first time, the tuner is unable to determine which device is the recording equipment onto which the music program should be downloaded. A device that has been selected as the recording device to which the music program should be downloaded is referred to as a “default device”.
While the default device is not existing, e.g., downloading is effected on the recording equipment for the first time, the external program should execute the sequence to request the internal program to obtain information of devices currently connected to the tuner, to display a list of connected devices and to request a user to select a specific device onto which music program should be downloaded.
Even when the tuner stored the previously-obtained information of the device in a predetermined memory within a control section (CPU), if the corresponding device is not connected to the tuner in the next download (e.g., if a user purchases a new device on which data should be downloaded and changes the previous device), then the tuner has to again obtain information of currently connected devices, to display a list of those connected devices and to urge the user to again select one device that should be used.
In the previously-proposed download, the download is effected on the device on which the download has been effected previously. Depending on the state of the device onto which data should be downloaded (whether the device has already been powered or a recording media has already been inserted into the device), after processing for executing the download has started, when a recording media is not inserted into the device, an abnormality occurs in the download and the download is often ended in somewhere of its processing. There is then the possibility that the tuner will become unable to select a proper device as a default device. Hence, the tuner has to make some device to solve this problem.
When a tuner can be connected to various networks (e.g., IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 1394 system, USB (Universal Serial Bus), etc.), unless the user makes complicated input operation to specify a device, the user becomes unable to specify a download target device connected to a specific network. Consequently, operation for the download becomes considerably cumbersome for the user.
While the problem arising when the music program is transmitted through the digital satellite broadcast has been described so far, a similar problem arises when various programs transmitted from the outside by broadcast waves are downloaded onto the receiving side based on data transmitted together with those programs.